Oikos was originally designated by the Greeks to mean home,
household and habitation. Oikos was then
linked to logos and nomos (the word of the law) to become
ecology.[1]
If we add the associated term for proper/properness/property (oikeios[2])
we now have the formulation: ‘the law of living properly in the world as home’.
We will be arguing that this is not, at least in the developed and developing
world, how we live.
If living in alignment
with the ecological is any measure, and if oikos
is a critical measure, then we can say that at an essential level we are
living unlawfully. Some of us know this, some of us feel it, but large numbers
of people still don’t know or do not care. However, in terms of ‘acting in the
world’ it is not as if, at a fundamental level, we can actually choose how to
live. The reality is we are thrown into a condition of worldly structural
unsustainability – it is elemental to the environment of our being. This means living
among ‘the madness of things’ and with the contradiction of consumption without
consuming. Reflect for a moment on just how much ‘stuff’ most of us have
gathered around ourselves to support the normality which is our unsustainable
way of life. We have wardrobes full of clothes; furniture and furnishings; books,
toys, cars, numerous electrical and electronic goods; gardening equipment,
sports gear, the material fabric of houses and apartments, and so on. As an
animal arisen out of animality does not this unchecked level of material
acquisition seem strange, bizarre, mad, extreme? Can this huge disjuncture
between what we actually need (materially, socially and psychologically) to
sustain ourselves in a condition of wellbeing and what we actually think
we need (and therefore acquire) continue?
We do not choose to
live in the midst of the ‘madness of things’. As said, we are born into it. This condition of normality is maintained and
extended by the ‘semiosphere’ of the market place as the (inter)face of the
cultural economy. This domain of images, messages and cultural practices is
where, and in so many ways, we are interpellated to become what we are. Such a
semiotic environment strives to engender desires for the promises offered by
commodities – yet frequently the pleasure, meaning and security promised is
illusory. Within this semiotic environment we learn how to act, what to desire,
how to dream – and, in large part, how to become unsustainable as a mode of
‘being-in-the-world’. Living in the sign-world of an economy centred on excess,
where a material fabric of commodification has run out of control, learning to
be otherwise is no easy task.
Part of our problem is
that (economic) consumption does not consume (biophysically) very much at all. The
economy in which consumption is operative is ecologically dislocated. Its ever
increasing globalization drives the dynamic of consumerist economic
development, and delivers the very antithesis of the well-being it is projected
to deliver.
In this context the
home is not the haven of security we take it to be. Yes, it is that place where
what Christopher Lasch called ‘the minimal self’ can retreat for comfort and
shelter in the storm of modern life.[3]
But the nemesis of this ‘being at home’ – the materiality of unsustainability –
grows closer. ‘Home’ here is not reducible to just a place – i.e., a house or
apartment. Before going further, we need to relate home to economics, but we
also need to expand that category to that of exchange.
Oikos and the general economy
Economy and does not
completely equate with economics, and in fact the nature of
Bio-physical ecologies
function by exchange at the most basic level of bio-chemical processes aided by
the power of the sun: taking matter though cycles of formation, transformation
and decomposition. At every stage of the cyclic process of something coming
into or out of being there is an exchange between elements. Georges Bataille
named this process ‘the general economy’ He also pointed out that the
development of economic systems by human beings –culminating in hegemonic
capitalism – has created a ‘restricted economy’ (i.e., a system that is disarticulated
from the general economy).[4]
This restrictive
economy was initiated many millennia ago, probably at the very beginning of
agricultural societies. The availability of a surplus made the exchange of
goods possible. The economic benefits that could be gained from exchange of this
excess came to be recognised and likely prompted the intent to produce, store
and trade a surplus. This exchange practice obviously became widespread and
normative, and it established a condition of economic dislocation that allowed
the restrictive economy to flourish and come to dominate human conduct. This
was equally underpinned by anthropocentrism – i.e., self/human-centred
interests which directed the act of exchange without reflecting upon the
consequence upon life in general.
The home in the restrictive economy
Over a vast expanse
of economic time (the time of all economic systems) the home became a primary
site of expenditure within the restrictive economy. First, it became a point of
reception for the arrival, use and using up of goods and services; second, it
became the location of the production of goods (‘cottage industries’); and
third, it became a location of servicing and supporting labour power. Finally,
the home was established as a primary zone of ‘consumption’ and continual
material destruction.
Income started to be
expended to acquire and accumulate an increasing number of goods for the home.
Some of these goods, combined with what Karl Marx’s called ‘unproductive
labour’ (returned to productive labour by feminist theory)[5]
were employed to support and service ‘labour power’. Take the example of a coal
miner in
As capitalism and
technology developed, the home became increasingly within the remit of the
restrictive economy. This can be seen with the rise of home economics and
domestic technologies.[6]
Christine Frederick, for instance, applied the scientific management methods of
Frederick Winslow Taylor to the management of the home and domestic labour.[7]
The home as a commodity sphere expanded with the introduction of domestic
technologies (like carpet sweepers followed by vacuum cleaners; clothes boilers
and mangles followed by washing machines; kitchen ranges followed by gas and
electric stoves). These were claimed as labour saving, but this was contradictory.
Such products, and all the electrical goods that came along after them
(fridges, electric kettles, food mixers, juicers, microwaves, etc.) required an
increase in the family wage. And, along with the purchase of other household
durable goods on credit, they generated debt. These trends combined with the extension
of the home interior as a key site for the acquisition and display of an increasing
number of decorative and commodities and treatments. Thus the home became an
ever more semiotically charged space. Decoration, technologies, functional and
non-utility artefacts all fused as the sign-world of domestic modernity.
To acquire and
display this modern designed and designing way of life more and more women
moved into the workforce. Initially these were single women
employed in office and administrative positions to service the increased
commerce generated by the output of mass production and promotion of goods by
mass communication print media. This gave rise to greater fashion awareness and
a willingness of women to spend their income on fashion items to meet the dress
standards demanded by workplaces and a social life linked to burgeoning
entertainment industry. The growth in fashion conscious consumers in turn led
to an increase in manufacturers of fashion goods– they simply recognised
the large future potential for profit.
The rising demand for
fashion items such as clothing, footwear and cosmetics (cosmetics were
associated with prostitution and only became socially acceptable in the 1920s)
led to an increase in retail space. Furthermore, with continual infiltration
of the media into women’s everyday life, in particular women’s magazines, and thereafter
the huge impact of film, ‘consumers’ became even more aware of, and captivated
by, fashion trends. Outward appearance and attractiveness came to be recognised
by almost all women of all classes as having a direct correlation to their
identity, and their economic and social success. Beauty was no longer the domain
of the naturally endowed or privileged, but was marketed to all women who had
the means to buy those commodities that purported to bring it. Indivisibly, the
fashion and cosmetic industry of the twentieth century thrived on the media’s preoccupation
with physical appearance and idealised female bodies.
Beyond the rise in
the power of mass fashion, more and more families began to develop a desire for
household goods, modern appliances, automobiles, and better housing – such
things became the means to realise a lifestyle, an identity and to express
success via ‘conspicuous consumption’. This drew more married women into the
workforce to help meet the cost of these new ‘needs’.
Obviously this
process has not stopped – in one direction in the ‘developed world’ the
explosion and turnover of goods directed at the home has constantly increased,
especially as the size of homes has grown. In the other direction, for the
‘developing world’, the home increasingly becomes a place for the growth of
‘consumption’ based on an unsustainable model drawn from developed nations.
These forces of unsustainability combine to ever increase the disjuncture
between the general and the restrictive economy. In so doing they add to the
case for another kind of economic system – one that is just and far more
sustain-able.
Home, exchange and destruction
While the home is
mostly seen and felt as a centre of security, shelter, personal regeneration
and nurture it is also a site of destruction
‘ … after the battlefield, the home is in the front line of destruction.’[8]
Material destruction
triggered in the home is not merely after the utility of goods is exhausted but
equally the erasure their sign value.[9]
‘Consumption’ (assisted by the power of the sign) drives production and
economic growth. Historically, it was the social order that gave objects their
importance, but increasingly, objects came to give persons social status. Beyond
this, people become objects of sign value. For millennia, body ornaments and
then fashion, were used by individuals and social groups to indicate status,
gender, class, wealth, etc. Fashion, as a non-verbal communication of meaning
and identity, has a longstanding relation to the power of individuals and groups.
Men and women in the corporate business world, for example, ‘power dress’ as a sign
of authority, success and position. The type of clothing a person wears is of
course also a sign of their ‘culture of association’, sub-culture, taste, self
image and so on.
Like fashion, the
interior of a home became an outward expression of status and culture, a
projection of taste or the lack of it, and the declaration or illusion of
wealth
The home can be seen
as the end of the line of the supply chain. Its destructiveness is measurable
not least by the volume of material it deposits into the waste stream and
landfill. Yet consumption has not been realised: many materials will not
biodegrade; numerous products are as they ever were materially, except they no
longer function; significant numbers of materials that could be recycled are
not because no recycling infrastructure exists to do so. And then there are those
products containing toxic materials that leach into the soil and find their way
into the water table, creeks, rivers or the ocean. Yet the home remains ‘clean’
– destruction is sent to the wasteland elsewhere.
Home and the nature of dwelling
So far ‘home’ has
been addressed as if it were simply a place, but it is not. We need to go to the
idea of dwelling to reconfigure how
the home can be thought and positioned. We humans dwell in our inner selves – and
this condition is indivisible from how we live and act in the world. At the
same time, the ‘external’ world is the home of our ‘home’.[10]
This complexity of dwelling, as our thinking directs what we build, and as what
we build directs our thinking in our being-in-the-world is the focus of Martin
Heidegger’s seminal essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’.[11]
In this geometry,
home embraces ‘the world’; the inner sanctum to which we retreat; and the locus
of our domestic life. Unsustainability is our enacted disjuncture between these
locations (of our being). As such it is the failure to recognise the ‘law of
the home’, housekeeping, oikos. The
implication is that we have to learn how to rethink home and its economy as it
becomes eco-nomy. Sustain-ability thus starts in our inner life.
Re-designing the home (ontologically)
What does ‘the’ home
do?
As we have argued ‘a
home’ is not a passive or neutral space. Increasingly it has become a designed
environment that designs. But we then ask – how does it design? Our answer is
far more than at the materialistically determinist level that haunts so much
domestic architecture. Of course spaces, their functions and domestic
technologies do instrumentally design what can be done in a home, but our concern
is more fundamentally ontological. As Mark Wigley put it: ‘we build a home and
a home builds us’.[12]
This comment
ruptures the binary cliché: nature vs nurture. The key point is that a home
constitutes an ontologically designing environment which has profound
consequences for the formation of our ontology. Here home is not a mere place,
large or small material space with a given aesthetic, filled with things, but
rather a complex intersection of the exchange
of objects, signs, information, social interaction and the designing power of
the ongoing and combined agency of all these ‘things’. So, rather than being
seen as a container, home is transit station through which pass the material
and the immaterial, the organic and the inorganic, ideas and knowledge. In this
milieu, subjects are formed and/or deformed with particular characteristics.
The worker, the husband, the father, the wife, the mother, the consumer, the
carer, the cared for, and so on, are the ‘we’ who prefiguratively build a home
(as the idea of home goes ahead of us) and who, in turn, are built by it (as
its form ontologically designs our mode of dwelling).
Always far more than
simply a house or apartment, the design
milieu of the home itself is the life of the home as lived. This living is
expressed through a designing engagement with a ‘being of beings’ and a ‘being with object-things’ in contexts
like domestic work, playing games, learning skills and ‘homework’, ‘home
entertainment’, pleasure, the giving and receiving of care. While the ontological
designing of the home (its self-building/building of the self) is often self-affirming,
the reverse is also the case. Dysfunction in myriad forms: nihilistic values,
anti-social conduct and unsustainable material practices, is the other, and
frequent, companion of, nurture. Dysfunction is as much a force of designing as
all other design agencies, as the home builds our ‘being and our being at home
in the world’.
The home is a complex
place of exchange in which bio-physical, psychic and fiscal economies collide. We
are a node of the general economy, a site of the collision, and a
representative of the restrictive economy as we serve it and as it serves us.
If all this sounds
contradictory it is because it is. Creation and destruction cohabit in all
economic practice. There can be no sustainment without knowing this and finding
our path through the contradictions of our economic life at, and beyond, ‘the
home’.
Home in the age of unsettlement
The world (as home)
is made increasingly unhomely as destructive material outputs of the (modern)
home impinge on the world’s general economy
The disjuncture between the restrictive and the general economy is
accelerating the unsustainable. ‘Environmental impacts’, as we represent them,
are but one kind of visible symptom of this situation. The home, as place, as
we have been arguing is centrally implicated in the disjuncture and consequent impacts.
As the impacts of the unsustainable proliferate in the form of varied
human-induced disaster events (from climate change ‘extreme’ events to related
crises in food production and resource stress prompting large movements of
populations and potential conflict) people everywhere will be ever more
unsettled.
Unsettlement is a
condition of mind and place; it destabilises the relations between the home,
inner life, dwelling and world. As such, the way we live, the way we are, will
change. Insecurity can but grow, which means that creating ways to positively
respond to this situation becomes ever more important.
We, wherever and
whoever we are, need to start thinking about how to create a new home (a new
kind of dwelling and a new kind of living) as well as seeking a resolution of
economic disjuncture. This can only happen by design, but for design to respond
it has to be changed.[13]
The starting point is learning how to redirect design so it may be redirective.[14]
Conclusion: the end of choice
We can no longer be
free to take without constraint and consume without limit.
Petra Perolini is lectures
in Interior Design at
[1] The Greek noun nomos
derived from the verb ‘nemein’ – to take, to seize. Nomos, as it shifted from meaning ‘custom’ to
‘law’, marked the move from the seizing of land to the claim of legal ownership
(property rights).
[2] Wigley The
Architecture of Deconstruction p. 102
[3] Christopher Lasch The Minimal Self
[4] Ibid., see also
Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism Yale French Studies ‘On Bataille’, no.
78, 1990.
[5] See Ann Ferguson, ‘Women
as a New Revolutionary Class’ in Between
Labour and Capital (ed. Pat Walker)
[6] See Ruth Schwartz Cowan More Work for Mothers
[7] F.W. Taylor
developed his theory and practice of scientific management while working in the
steel industry in the
[8] Tony Fry A New Design Philosophy
[9] The key text that
established the significance of the power of the sign was Jean Baudrillard’s For a Critique of the Political Economy of
the Sign
[10] On the relation between
‘our home’ and the world as home see Tony Fry, ‘Homelessness – A Philosophical
Architecture’ Design Philosophy Papers
Collection Three (ed. Anne-Marie Willis) Ravensbourne: Team D/E/S, 2007,
pp. 19-28.
[11] Martin Heidegger,
‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ in Poetry
Language Thought (trans. Albert Hofstadter)
[12] Wigley The Architecture of Deconstruction p.
111.
[13] See Tony Fry Design Futuring Oxford:
Berg, 2009.
[14] Ibid.